05 Jul Dragged Away – July Update

Today I start the task of remastering Dragged Away in 3D for a planned early access release this Halloween. This post is just the start of planning this as I prepare to go into production.

What is Dragged Away?

Dragged Away is an JRPG about overcoming fears. Something mysterious is chasing you. You don’t know where you are, why you’re here, or where you’re going. Can you outrun this mysterious thing long enough to discover what it is?

Above is my standard pitch but let me break that down in more detail. As you play Dragged Away, you discover you’re being following by something mysterious. You notice other people in your world are experiencing the same thing. You have to be a detective to figure out what people are afraid of and help them overcome their fear.

As you play the game, as a game designer I take note of a couple things:

Overall choices you make

The tone you choose

How long it takes you to defeat a fear

If a mic is available, how loud you are DB wise while defeating that fear.

and a few other things…

Then after you play several fears, I calculate all that up and present you with what’s been following you that game session. There are silly fears like being afraid of spoons or big words and serious ones like heights and spiders. My hope is that maybe I can help make people more sympathetic to people with silly fears and just maybe help some people face their fears in some odd comical but maybe scary way.

Why are you Remastering it?

The original game was 2D and funded on Kickstarter in 2014 . I pushed that version of the game to backers late 2016 but realized after having made the game that 2D wasn’t the best form for it. Recently pulled the 2D version of the game from the internet. So all my backers will forever have this special 2D copy of my game.

Why did you do 2D initially?

A lot attributed to the fact that this was my first game since Zap Em and I didn’t feel comfortable at all doing 3D by myself at the time.

Why 3D?

With 3D you can do a lot emotionally with camera angles and that you just can’t accomplish in 2D without a lot of work.

Lastly I wanted to change the tone for a younger audience as well. It’s something that my contact at Nintendo kept pushing for but I was really under the gun to meet my release date for backers.

What’s going to be different?

I’m porting the game to Unity, rewriting all the dialogue and story lines, update game play, add new functionality, and lastly updating the world and characters in 3D.

What are your goals for functionality?

Being me, I set a very aggressive goal of having a Halloween release date for early access. That’s 7 months, 227 days, or 32 weeks from today. I feel comfortable saying that I can have roughly half the features by this Halloween and over the next year finish the rest of the features in 3D.

3 worlds

3-5 playable fears

I’d also like to add some new things like a make a level editor for Steam workshop so you can create your own fears, multiplayer options to play with your friends and maybe do a medical study on all of this. Those are wishlist items though.